The Truth About What Banking Internship Hours Are Like

Flickr
In light of the recent death of an investment banking intern in London (who was apparently epileptic) and with all the misinformation and romanticized banking horror stories being peppered all over the place, I thought I'd (try to) settle this for once and for all and clear up all the bull----.

With respect to the people saying that it's "NEVER" expected to work 3 back to back all nighters, or that interns aren't expected to work all nighters--you guys might be too senior to notice it happening.

There is a team that sits near me at my shop that regularly has to pull back to back all nighters, because they have a terrible staffer and awful seniors to work for. They don't even go home for the shower anymore; they have a few sets of fresh clothes under the desk. Unsurprisingly, the majority quit post-bonus. HR is puzzled, but people are too afraid to tell the truth about how badly the workload for that team is managed.

This is just patently false. Its not at all like this in the industry.

This sounds more like one of the college kids that so frequently troll WSO and are for whatever reason turned on by the idea of working ridiculous (beyond the pale of reality) hours in banking.

The amount of misinformation about the banking lifestyle on WSO in fairly absurd. And it stems largely from these nerdy kids who think its a badge of honor to somehow work ridiculous hours. Its the same kids who when they first start working will stay in the office for absolutely no reason. Its the same kids who try to impress people by bragging about their ridiculous work schedules. Its the same kids that build a 16 tab model with 11 different scenarios and 8 sensitivity tables to run statistics on how many hours per week they are working.

You see this through levels in banking, these are the VPs that are in the office until midnight-1AM consistently. Its the directors and MDs in the office until 10 or 11. They are legitimately sad people, you feel sorry for them. To some degree banking is constantly forcing people to demonstrate their worth, and some people think that their worth is quantified by how many hours they spend in the office. What you start to see is that the 'face time' people initially starting putting in to demonstrate their worth to other people, starts becoming their own sense of self worth. Yeah, that's some deep Dr Phil s---.

Pulling 100 hour weeks is fairly intense. But even still its working from 9AM to 1AM during the week. And working from 10AM to 8PM on Saturday and Sunday. Its not really that bad. Its just horrific in comparison to working a normal job and going to happy hour after work, and brunch and college football on Saturdays and chilling at home all day on Sundays.